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By Johnna Villaviray, Senior Reporter
(Last of three parts)
“I am JI.”
It wasn’t a confession beaten out of a
detainee. It was the pronouncement of Ahmed Santos, whose property
the police raided last year for allegedly hosting guerrilla training
for Muslims.
The Jemaah Islamiah he is professing his oneness
with is the global community of Muslims, not necessarily the group
blamed for the Bali, Indonesia, attack that killed nearly 200 people
last October.
Non-Muslims don’t see the distinction, but
this doesn’t stop Santos from professing his faith. He explains
that it would be like a betrayal of Islam to be cowed by external
pressure.
Islam could be the most misunderstood and, since
the September 11 attacks against the United States, the most feared
of religions. Muslims insist that theirs is a religion of peace, but
strangers to the faith find it hard to believe, given the rising
number of bomb attacks attributed to radical Muslim groups.
“Projecting Islam as a violent religion is
propaganda of the Jews and their surrogates,” Santos said,
alluding to the United States, which leads the global antiterror
coalition.
The jihad the mujahideen—Muslim guerrilla
warriors—have been waging all these decades is rooted in land;
they want to retake Israel, which they say belonged to the Muslims
before the time of the prophets. That secessionist Muslims in
Mindanao have the same argument—that the Southern Philippines was
Muslim land before Christian settlers came.
The similarity in goals and the strong sense of
brotherhood among Muslims are potentially explosive ingredients in
the country’s already unstable security teapot.
The Police Intelligence chief, Sr. Supt. Arthur
Lomibao, acknowledged that Balik Islam is a “potential security
threat, but not in the short term.”
There is no crackdown on Balik Islam, although
Santos’s Fi Sabilillah Da’wah Foundation, iscag, iwwm and some
other Balik Islam organizations are under police and military
surveillance. At least five Fi Sabilillah members were reportedly
abducted by the Armed Forces’ intelligence service.
Suspicion about these Muslim groups could be an
extension of the distrust of the organizations established here in
the 1990s by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Jamaal al-Khaliffa.
These organizations include the International Islamic Relief
Organization and the International Relief and Information Center.
The other groups Khaliffa established are not as active as before,
owing to the negative publicity generated by the US antiterror
campaign.
Authorities believe that these nongovernment
organizations were used as fronts to fund the training of mujahideen
and to acquire weapons and ammunition. With the NGOs under scrutiny,
interest was supposedly transferred to select Balik Islam groups.
The following Balik Islam groups have aroused
official curiosity: Al Maarif Educational Center in Baguio City,
Da’rul Hijra Foundation Inc. in Makati City, Fi Sabilillah,
Islamic Information Center in Quiapo, iscag, and the Islamic
Learning Center of Pangasinan. None of their principals, however,
has been directly associated with illegal activities.
Jamil Almares, iscag’s operations chief,
acknowledged that iscag still receives donations from overseas,
primarily from philanthropists in Saudi Arabia and other Middle East
countries. He acknowledged that funds are not as easy to come by now
as before, but explained that the drop in donations started long
before the anti-terror campaign.
“Some of our brothers took advantage of the
goodwill of the donors, sometimes using funds for mosques and
madrasahs for personal use. That’s why the donors are more careful
now,” Almares said.
He said being identified as a terrorist
supporter or financier just added to the reasons not to send as much
zakat, or the mandatory donation of at least one percent of one’s
annual savings. To offset the decline in donations, iscag is renting
out apartment space inside its Dasmariñas, Cavite, compound.
The iscag compound is one of the Muslim
communities established in Luzon. This was what Santos aimed to set
up in Anda, but the project was abandoned after a police raid in
2002. Another community is being established in Tarlac.
Yousuf “Joey” Ledesma, a former La Salle
economics professor, said Muslims would only feel wholly comfortable
within an Islamic community.
“There, we can be far from the temptations of
Western culture,” he explained.
The increasing number of Muslim communities and
mosques in Luzon is a sign that Islam is spreading fast here.
In December 2000 the Office of Muslim Affairs (OMA)
recorded 33 mosques in Metro Manila, 29 in Northern Luzon, 15 in
Central Luzon, 56 in Southern Luzon including Bicol, and 38 in the
Visayas.
“The spread of Islam is not necessarily the
problem; it’s the spread of the radical interpretation of
Islam,” said Senior Supt. Rodolfo Mendoza. He was a key operative
in foiling a plot to kill Pope John Paul II during his 1995 Manila
visit and the bombing of several US jetliners bound for Japan in
1995.
“We are at war with Islam, and the Muslims are
the aggressors. Nobody wants to recognize that, but that’s
what’s happening,” Mendoza said.
Nobody else in government has gone public with
views similar to Mendoza’s, although some could be thinking along
similar lines. Acknowledging a religious war would only widen the
divide between the Muslims and the secular government.
The government recognizes, however, that it
cannot sit back and watch the rise of what even some Muslims call a
deviant form of Islam.
“The spread is chilling because of the
radicalism of Islamic converts. There has to be a paradigm shift in
the thinking of the political leadership [to deal with],” Mendoza
said.
He lamented the harassing or arresting of
suspected terrorist supporters as an ineffective way of dealing with
the problem. It would only heighten the animosity of Muslims toward
the government, he said.
The government has been adopting a rounded
approach to the secessionist problem in Mindanao—military and
economic.
It hasn’t been very effective. But it is
adding another factor to complete the equation: education.
The Armed Forces is carrying out a
distance-learning program to ensure that residents provide an
alternative to the jihad-locked minds of some Muslims. It involves
hooking up remote barangays to a satellite dish where educational
programs for the residents could be beamed from Manila.
“The aim is not to destroy their culture,
because the idea is to get programs from Muslim countries, but to
make sure they get inputs from other sources, not just from whom
they have access to,” Brig. Gen. Victor N. Corpus explained.
Corpus is the chief of the military’s civil relations service.
He acknowledged that radicalism could gain a
foothold, especially in remote areas, because residents have no
access to alternative points of view.
But he stressed that it should not be viewed as
an attack on Islam. “The majority of Muslims do not believe that
the Philippines is an area where jihad is necessary, because
everyone is free to practice his or her religion.”
The office of Muslim Affairs chief, Zamzamin
Ampatuan, agreed that “improving the quality of life for Muslim
communities” is the key to dealing with the secessionist problem
in Mindanao and the pockets of radicalism in the local Muslim
community.
But he pointed out that Muslims should share the
responsibility.
“We don’t have a bad image, because of
misimpressions alone. The image is created by the community also and
we have to work to change that image,” he said.
Part 1 | Part
2 |
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